She has a job in real estate and spends her evenings meeting and socialising
with friends; posting, tweeting and messaging her way through her nights out
using a series of apps on her smartphone.

All of those apps, though, have been downloaded free of charge.

She particularly likes the Weishin voicemail app she tells me, because it's
fun, convenient and free.

'In-app' sales

So how, then, do you make money as an app developer in China?

One way is to try to target "in-app" sales; give away the app for free, get
users hooked, and then sell them the chance to enhance their experience for a
small fee.

It's a model used most successfully by the bigger developers of mobile games
technology and the idea is simple.

Although users in China may be willing only to pay a few cents for the
enhanced service, when you're talking millions of users, that can soon add up to
a lot of money.

But for non-gaming app developers, advertising revenue is the way forward,
and July Cheng, a young mother based in Shanghai, is showing how easy it can
be.

Her home-made app, developed for her twins, has become a surprise overnight
success with tens of thousands of downloads.

Young mother July Cheng
developed her children's flashcard app for her twins; she now makes more than
$1,000 a month (Source: BBC News)

For each one, July is paid a commission from the pop-up-ads linked to the
app, and she now earns more than $1,000 a month this way.

"You just need one mobile phone, one PC and your good ideas," she tells
me.

The holy grail for app developers, though, may well be finding ways to hitch
a ride on China's booming luxury brand sales.

Apps like Guanxi.me have valuable social networking databases that could
prove very attractive to high street retailers.

Couple that with the phone's geo-location data, and suddenly the mobile phone
offers advertisers a way to get personalised offers into the hands, or onto the
smartphone screens, of customers at the moment they pass by the shop door.

“Once you start to become successful, your app will be
copied"Michael ClendendinRed
Tech Advisors

Copy cats

This kind of technology is being developed in many
markets, of course, but it is in China, with the sheer scale of the mobile
market and the country's booming sales of luxury brands, that the opportunities
might prove the most attractive.

One major challenge remains however, and it's an old one: the country's
notoriously weak protection for intellectual property.

China overtakes US as largest smartphone market

For the first time, China has surpassed the United States to become the world's largest smartphone market by volume.

"The United States remains the world’s largest smartphone market by revenue, but China has overtaken the United States in terms of volume," said Neil Mawston, Strategy Analytics executive director. "China is now at the forefront of the worldwide mobile computing boom. China has become a large and growing smartphone market that no hardware vendor, component maker or content developer can afford to ignore.”

The research firm said that smartphone shipments reached a record 24 million units in China during the third quarter of this year, compared to 23 million units in the United States.

China, of course, is already the world's largest country, with a population of 1.3 billion; the United States' population is 313 million.

“China’s rapid growth has been driven by an increasing availability of smartphones in retail channels, aggressive subsidizing by operators of high-end models like the Apple iPhone, and an emerging wave of low-cost Android models from local Chinese brands such as ZTE," said Tom Kang, Strategy Analytics director.

Indeed, Android phones are coming to dominate much of the world: Another report, from Canalys, said that Google's mobile OS has almost 50 percent of the global smartphone market, dominating in the Asia-Pacific region.

"The relatively slow migration to higher-speed networks in China to date reflects the fact that smartphone penetration is still low — but rising fast," Wireless Intelligence noted at the end of the second quarter of this year.

"Smartphones are thought to account for around 10 percent of China's total base, but the exact figure is hard to calculate due to the large number of 'grey market' smart devices in the market. China Mobile, for example, says it already has 5.6 million iPhone users on its network, even though the devices can only currently access the operator's (older) 2G ... network and the device is not retailed by the operator."